


A Shriveled Sage, A Blind Seer, and An Almighty Corpse

by Zandris_Hugal



Series: Master of the Jedi [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Jedi Temple Bombing (Star Wars: The Clone Wars), Spiritual, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 18:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28817469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zandris_Hugal/pseuds/Zandris_Hugal
Summary: In his final month of life, Yoda - Master of the Jedi and the last Jedi Master - finds himself visited by none other than the Emperor: the  greatest enemy the Jedi Order ever knew. Thus ensues one final battle of wit and wills between the ultimate Jedi and the ultimate Sith.
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi & Yoda, Sheev Palpatine & Yoda, Yoda & Barriss Offee
Series: Master of the Jedi [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086278
Kudos: 7





	A Shriveled Sage, A Blind Seer, and An Almighty Corpse

**Entry II** of the **_Master of the Jedi_** series. Sequel to _ **A Dwarf, A Ghost, and A Slave**_.

* * *

 **Location** \- The Swamp World of Dagobah

 **Time** \- The opening minutes of _Star Wars: Return of the Jedi_ , just after Darth Vader arrives on the Second Death Star. Concurrent with the deleted scene of Luke Skywalker constructing his lightsaber.

* * *

Cold. Cold. Everything felt so cold.

A diminutive green sage wheezed weakly in his bed, drinking in every moment of respite from his mucous-ridden coughs. He felt as though every millimeter of his two-thirds of a meter body was besieged by a frost chill wafting through the Crystal Caves of Ilum, despite the world of his residence rarely dropping within 10 Galactic Standard degrees of the freezing point of water.

Yet even under the collective pile of all the blankets he owned, the Master of the Jedi knew the nature of the chill that afflicted him. The icy chill of death.

For nine-hundred he was. Older than any recorded member of his species had ever been. Older than all but four Jedi Masters in the Order's thirty-thousand year history had ever been.

But though this particular Jedi Master, this particular Master of the Jedi, had achieved more power through the Force than any in that Order of Light ever had - even he was mortal.

Moreso, his unprecedented connection to and immersion within the Light Side of the Force possibly proved more of a bane than a boon to this Jedi Master's health over the past five decades. For the Light's power, influence, and sustenance had decreased daily over this time period as the Dark Side grew in strength. By the final year of the Clone War, the Dark Side had a stronger claim over the energies within the galaxy than it ever had.

A hold tremendously amplified twenty-three years and four months before on the final day of that dreadful war by the galaxy wide mass murder of the Jedi Order.

A cataclysmic event which saw the twenty thousand bright lights in service of the Force and the galaxy reduced to a quarter of a hundred in the span of a couple hours.

Hungry for more Jedi blood, Darth Vader hunted and extinguished each and every remaining remnant of the Order he once served, until only two there were. An Apprentice too young for his own good and a Master too old to be of much good.

For Master Yoda knew he was in the twilight of his life. Even if he could summon the magnitude of power necessary to overwhelm the treacherous Darth Vader and the Emperor who commanded him, the dying Master of the Jedi simply did not have a body able enough to channel it any more.

After the green sage's showdown with the Dark Lord of the Sith on the first night of the Empire's evil reign, though each Master of the Force proved equal to the other in skill and power, the battle concluded with the Emperor cackling and the Jedi Master's heart near cracking from the strain and toll the battle took.

Sadly, Master Yoda's body that calamitous night was virile as a gundark in comparison to the half-dead geezer that hoarsely gasped for breath now.

In fact, he would have already surrendered his consciousness to the ethereal power of the Force had he not been waiting for the return of his final and finest student.

The student who Master Yoda had taught the least, but somehow had learned the most. Indeed, earlier that day the Force permitted the Master of the Jedi to witness the young Skywalker, a young man of age akin to a Padawan half a decade away from completing the Jedi Trials, construct his own lightsaber unassisted. A feat accomplished by Jedi Padawans only at the tail end of their typically dozen-year apprenticeship to a Jedi Knight or Jedi Master. Said dozen years serving as the continuation of the decade and a half worth of Initiate training a Jedi would undertake from infancy or toddler age to their mid-to-late teens.

And yet Luke Skywalker achieved the complete skill of a Jedi Knight with only three months of formal training and about a year's worth of self practice. This befuddled and flummoxed Master Yoda to no end.

Despite having instructed tens of thousands of Jedi Younglings and personally trained two scores of Jedi Padawans to Knighthood, Master Yoda could not for the life of him understand how his forty-first Padawan had progressed so quickly. Luke Skywalker had advanced exponentially faster than his father. And even though Master Yoda had always believed the boy possess a stronger innate connection to the Force than his father, the Master of the Jedi knew very well that it could not be an exponentially stronger connection to the Force.

Now, Luke had proven to be a far more serious student in the Ways of the Jedi than his father was under Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. But regardless, the future Darth Vader received ten years of training in the Force from a man who even then was one of the greatest Jedi Masters the Order had ever produced. Nine years of training in saber combat from a Jedi who as but a Padawan struck down one of the deadliest Sith Lords to ever challenge the Jedi Order.

The pinnacle embodiment of the Light, Obi-Wan Kenobi was.

 _"There is no need to flatter me so in your thoughts,"_ spoke Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, the blue-tinted form of his middle-aged figure materializing in a seated position on the bed.

"Always...in high regard...have I...held you," Yoda wheezed out, before devolving into a hacking fit of mucous-based coughs.

Obi-Wan put an ethereal hand on his dying friend. As the transcendent Jedi Master was one with the Force, his presence alone provided a soul-energizing warmth that eased the pain of the Jedi's Master. Allowing the shriveled sage to feel more alive than he had in a year.

"The best Jedi I have ever known, you are," Yoda stated as a matter of fact. For no one he had ever known embodied the Jedi Code as perfectly as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

 _"What is a Jedi?"_ the Force Spirit who had just been hailed as the ultimate Jedi unexpectedly returned.

"By that, what mean you?" Yoda inquired of his old friend, confusion adding some extra wrinkles to the green sage's crinkled face.

 _"You have been thinking upon Luke Skywalker's light-speed advancement in the Light Side of the Force. How it has made a mockery of even our most generous predictions for a Jedi student of his potential,"_ Obi-Wan responded.

"No means to predict the true rate of a Skywalker's progression, did we have," Yoda countered.

"Said yourself that Vader was a lazy Jedi Padawan, you did. That content he was to coast on his natural talent, and that true devotion he never held for the tenants of the Jedi Order that so easily betrayed, he did," the Master of the Jedi reminded.

"Fitting it was, for this young Skywalker to more ably wield his lightsaber when departed Dagobah he did than his father when created that weapon, Vader did," the venerable sage finished with a back-handed insult to the twenty-year old Anakin Skywalker that Yoda had so foolishly knighted 10 days after the Battle of Geonosis.

Yet this biting remark belied the false bravado behind it. For in reality, Master Yoda could not comprehend how Luke accrued greater speed, timing, spacing, flexibility, ingenuity, and precision with the weapon after three months of daily drills than Anakin Skywalker possessed as a nascent Jedi Knight. A rank that came after four years of field experience, experience that came four years after his Master Obi-Wan helped him create his first lightsaber.

For even thirty millennia after its invention, the lightsaber still proved to be the most unique and dynamic weapon in the galaxy entire. A sword capable of melting durasteel and deflecting the energy blasts of a starfighter with naught but a meter-long, nigh-weightless plasma blade.

Because the hilt alone possessed perceivable weight, all forms of martial and melee combat developed over the tens of millennia of war and bloodshed proved impotent at best when applied to the lightsaber. And at worst, fatal to he who attempted to command a seemingly weightless blade with disciplines structured around the weight of a weapon.

Safe use of a lightsaber all but required the supernatural senses, preternatural reflexes, and precognitive abilities granted by a trained and practiced use of the Force to sense and predict the trajectories the energy blade would take with each physical stance of the Jedi. To wield a lightsaber to dispatch so much as a trio of thugs in the lower levels of Coruscant took years of training and study. The most gifted Jedi duelists to ever live would be the first to attest this fact.

For this was true for all, even Anakin Skywalker. But not his son apparently. A son who at the beginning of his training under Master Yoda already possessed the saber skills of a nascent Padawan. And exited as a duelist more apt and able than Anakin Skywalker, the greatest prodigy that Jedi Order had ever seen, was as of his Knighthood.

Impossible!

 _"Is it though? Or perhaps, have we simply deemed it impossible?"_ Obi-Wan suggested in soothing voice.

 _"During the Clone War, our Order faced a threat that could contest and best the finest Jedi Masters without our decades of study and immersion in the Force,"_ the ethereal Jedi Master mentioned.

"A cyborg, Grievous was," Yoda said of the Separatist General of the Droid Army. A Jedi Hunter who by the end of the Clone War slew more Jedi in personal combat than even Freedon Nadd. A kill count which would be exceeded only by Darth Vader.

"A product of algorithms produced by the finest combat computers the Techno Union ever created, Grievous' ability to match Jedi Masters of the Council was," the green sage stated.

 _"Not to mention that his Kaleesh mind could process the split-second analyzations. And his decades of dedication to the arts of combat and war provided him the judgment to discern what tactics to employ,"_ Obi-Wan recounted of the enemy he engaged in nearly half-a-score of lightsaber battles before the Jedi Master finally dispatched him on Utapau, mere hours before the betrayal and destruction of the Jedi Order.

 _"But the threat I referred to was the Dathomirian Nightbrother Savage Opress,"_ the Force Ghost declared.

 _"You recall how with but three seasons worth of experience in the arts of lightsaber combat, he managed to cut down Master Gallia. One of the premiere saber duelists of our era,"_ the blue tinted Jedi Master reminded.

"Trained from birth in the arts of Force guided and augmented physical combat, the Nightbrothers were," Yoda spoke of the male clan of Force-Sensitive Zabrak-Echani hybrids that used to dwell on the planet Dathomir. One of the many Force-Sensitive sects that the Dark Lord Sidious and his apprentice Darth Vader ensured the destruction of.

"While little experience did the brother of Darth Maul accrue in the use of a lightsaber, a lifetime's worth of training in the principles of the weapon did he have," he added.

"And...the Dark Side did he use," the Master of the Jedi dictated with finality. For it was a persistently proven fact that the aggressive and vicious nature of the Dark Side of the Force led to speedier progression in the magnitude of power a Force User commanded.

The Jedi with the most rapid advancements in power and prowess almost always had a dark streak within them. Many managed to reign in these impulses and become some of the Jedi Order's greatest champions, such as Jedi Master Mace Windu. To Yoda's great shame, even he himself had flirted with his darker aspects in his younger years.

But he had not fallen like an unfortunate number of Jedi prodigies had over the ages. Xendor, Ajunta Pall, Freedon Nadd, Exar Kun, Ulic-Qel Droma, Darth Revan, Darth Malak, Darth Traya, Darth Desolous, Darth Kaan, Darth Tyranus, and Darth Vader were the first dozen names to come to Yoda's mind when he considered servants of the Light who allowed their lives to be forever dominated by the Dark.

For despite the good attributes each initially possessed, at the core of every one of these persons' beings resided a hunger for power. And they found their cherished power in the Dark Side. They each boasted of surpassing their former peers and mentors. Yet none of them ever quite found the happiness and content they expected to come from their newfound power. Such was the hollow trap of the Dark Side.

One Master Yoda desperately hoped his final student wouldn't fall into.

 _"But if the Dark Side alone can grant a more rapid progression than would be possible in the path of our Jedi Order, then how come Luke has advanced far faster in one year than Darth Vader ever did in over twenty-three years as a Sith Lord?"_ Obi-Wan queried.

 _"Surely you have felt how strong the boy has become,"_ the ethereal Jedi Master added, to which Yoda nodded.

For when the Force allowed him to witness the young Jedi Skywalker construct his lightsaber, the strength and power the green sage rattled every brittle bone of his body. The sheer intensity of the power that radiated from the twenty-three year old Padawan initially caused the Master of the Jedi to believe he was somehow seeing Darth Vader with an illusion draped over himself.

But then, Yoda witnessed the dark tendrils of Darth Vader's telepathic presence harass and plague his son, confirming that it truly was Luke Skywalker who Yoda beheld.

There were some flecks of darkness within the young Skywalker's soul, but there were actually much fewer than they had been a year ago when the boy rushed off to prematurely face his father. Yoda simply could not understand how Luke's power had multiplied by such a degree while veering further away from the Dark Side.

 _"Maybe there is something within Luke that allows him to understand the Light better than we, old friend,"_ Obi-Wan suggested of his student.

Yoda nearly snorted at this preposterous statement. But upon replaying his dearest friend's suggestion in his mind several times over, the nine-hundred year old sage had to wonder if there perhaps could be some truth in this.

For all of the other Jedi Knights that this young Skywalker so radically eclipsed in progression had orthodox Jedi Training. Even Darth Vader, though a very late beginner, received orthodox Jedi Training.

But if it was the lack of orthodox Jedi Training that allowed Luke to advance so astoundingly...did that mean the eight centuries Yoda spent teaching Jedi were for naught? That the twenty-seven years it took for most Jedi to progress from the first day of instruction as a Youngling to that final Knighting ceremony...was a sham?

The tutelage Master Qui-Gon Jinn had provided Yoda over the past two dozen years demonstrated many flaws in the orthodox methodology of the Jedi Order. But at least Qui-Gon Jinn had once been a pre-eminent Jedi Master in the Order. Luke Skywalker...he was just a boy! The very real possibility that he innately connected with the Light better than Yoda and any Yoda had trained...it almost hurt.

The Master of the Jedi opened his mouth to respond to his dearest friend, but closed it as he felt a dark presence descend onto the world.

A dark sentient presence.

A familiar presence.

One that Yoda recognized, but the name for whom just escaped the grasp of his mind. Like a whisper just at the edge of hearing...

"Barriss Offee," the venerable sage uttered as he finally put his figurative finger on the identity of the presence.

The dying dwarf sputtered out a fit of painful coughs as his heart sank. Barriss Offee brought back memories of some of the Master of the Jedi's worst judgments during the Clone War.

Two years and two months into the war, on the first day of the eighth month of the year 1010 - a thousand and ten years after the conclusion of the Great Battle for Coruscant which saw the end of the Dark Lord Kaan's Sith Empire - the Jedi Temple was bombed. A horrific attack which caused six Jedi to rejoin the Force they served.

It initially appeared that the Jedi Padawan Ahsoka Tano had been the Jedi Coordinator behind the attack. The Senate wanted to serve the harshest possible punishment to the sixteen year old Togruta girl: execution. Their main reason was to remind enemies of the Republic just how quickly punishment would be met out for an attack in the heart of Coruscant. Thus so that their precious Capitol Dome would not be the next target in a bomber's sights.

In retrospect, the Supreme Chancellor must have allowed this to proceed for the specific goal of filling the heart of the Jedi Knight who trained Ahsoka Tano with an undying hatred and bitterness for the Senate and the Jedi Order who served his Padawan up to such an ignoble end. For that Jedi Knight was Anakin Skywalker, who had been singled out for conversion to the Dark Side by the Dark Lord of the Sith leading the Republic.

Fortunately for all, the Supreme Chancellor underestimated how determined the future Darth Vader would be to exonerate his own Jedi student. Knight Skywalker deduced and exposed the true identity of the coordinator of the bombing: the twenty-six year old Jedi Padawan Barriss Offee. The student of renowned Jedi Master Luminara Unduli. And a Jedi Padawan that the Council had planned to Knight on her twenty-seventh birthday which fell at the end of that very month.

Instead of Knighting, Barriss Offee received an expulsion from the Jedi Order and a trial in the Senate. However, in a move the Supreme Chancellor doubtlessly suggested to invoke the righteous rage of Anakin Skywalker, the prosecutors of Jedi Temple Bombing case no longer sought the death penalty.  
  
Instead, she received a life sentence in the same maximum security prison that held the Techno Union foreman Wat Tambor, one of the members of the Separatist War Council.

By means unknown, but in hindsight no doubt orchestrated by the Dark Lord of the Sith, Barriss Offee managed to escape from the prison with Wat Tambor in tow. Returning this core member of the Separatist War Council brought her tremendous favor in the eyes of the Separatist Head of State - Darth Tyranus. Who in those final months of the Clone War took Barriss on as his final Dark Apprentice, and crafted her into his deadliest.

So deadly that mere days before the fateful Battle of Coruscant, Barriss Offee received one final mission from the soon-to-be-dead Darth Tyranus. To seek out and dispatch Jedi Council Master Oppo Rancisis. A mission which the Dark Assassin successfully completed.

A mission which no doubt had been handed down from the Dark Lord Sidious himself. Because it was this vacancy on the Jedi Council that allowed the Dark Lord as Supreme Chancellor to request Anakin Skywalker's appointment to the ruling body of the Jedi Order. An appointment the Jedi Council granted while denying the twenty-three year old Jedi Knight the rank of Jedi Master. A humiliation which no doubt was the final push that inspired the Anakin to revel in all the anger and hate of his heart, to betray the Jedi, and assume the moniker of Darth Vader. And the very night Darth Vader pledged his allegiance to the Dark Lord Sidious, the two deadliest Sith Lords to ever live got their revenge on the Jedi Order.

As for Barriss Offee, Yoda was admittedly surprised to learn she was alive all these years later. He had assumed Darth Vader would have (brutally) killed her soon after assuming his role as the Emperor's right hand. Both for being the apprentice of Darth Tyranus and perhaps in vengeance for what had happened to his own Jedi Apprentice.

Then again, this was the same Darth Vader that strangled his pregnant wife a day after converting to the Dark Side. Not to mention that sixteen years after that, seven years before present day, this very Sith Lord reunited with Ahsoka Tano one final time on the Sith world of Malachor. And of the two, only Darth Vader left that dark world.

So it was very possible the Emperor’s Enforcer simply didn't care about what Barriss Offee had done to his erstwhile Jedi Padawan.

 _"Barriss has spent many years searching for you,"_ Obi-Wan informed, aware of all that had transpired and currently transpired due to the omnipresent nature of the Force he was one with.

"Commanded by the Emperor, she is?" Yoda half asked, ninety-nine percent certain of the answer.

 _"Yes old friend,"_ Obi-Wan answered.

"Here to kill me, is she?" Yoda asked the ethereal Jedi Master.

 _"Perhaps she believes so, but that is not what the Emperor intends,"_ the Force Ghost responded.

"Then a visitor I will have in a couple hours," the Master of the Jedi concluded, to which his dearest friend nodded in affirmation.

 _"Brace yourself,"_ Obi-Wan advised Yoda before dissipating into thin air. For both Jedi Masters knew it would not be Barriss Offee that the nine-hundred year old sage would soon be speaking to. Rather, she would serve as a disposable mouthpiece for the greatest enemy the Jedi Order had ever known.

The enemy that Yoda's final and finest student would be facing very soon.


End file.
